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Jonathan Anderson sitting on a chair next to a plinth with a stoneware pot on top.
‘I feel an obligation to help redefine craft’: Jonathan Anderson with stoneware pot by Loewe Craft Prize finalist Jennifer Lee. Photograph: Pal Hansen/The Observer
‘I feel an obligation to help redefine craft’: Jonathan Anderson with stoneware pot by Loewe Craft Prize finalist Jennifer Lee. Photograph: Pal Hansen/The Observer

Jonathan Anderson: ‘Craft is an antidote to digital media’

This article is more than 5 years old

As the Loewe Craft Prize winner is announced, creative director Jonathan Anderson reveals how he fell for the handmade – and why it is so important

My grandfather was a textile designer and when I was a boy he took me to the factory where he worked in Northern Ireland, to see camouflage fabric being screen-printed for the British army. I was fascinated by the act of making, the use of technique and the way it boils down to the relationship with materials. He also passed on a passion for ceramics. I remember him handing me a 17th-century Delft vase he got for £5, and showing me how amazingly well painted it was.

I bought my first ceramic piece about 10 years ago. I remember coming out of the British Museum and seeing a black and white vase in the small ceramics shop there and thinking: “I’d love that for my desk.” It was a piece by John Ward, but I didn’t know at the time. I’m a huge fan of his work now and have bought more.

Sometimes, when you work in the creative field, you just need to surround yourself with things you just couldn’t make yourself, but that inspire you. It keeps you grounded. I have now built my collection to include Ian Godfrey, Lucie Rie and Hans Coper. It’s not all rare: I think the line of domestic ware Lucie Rie did with Coper for Heal’s is fantastic. It’s a super humble product and I use it. If it breaks, it breaks. You cannot be precious about these things. I don’t want to live in a display case. Maybe John Ward would not approve, but I put flowers in his vase: that’s what makes it mine, part of my world.

We should surround ourselves with things that make us happy. I think what Jim Ede did at Kettle’s Yard, his former home in Cambridge [now an art gallery] is one of the most amazing contemporary examples of how we can live with objects. It changed my aesthetic and my viewpoint – especially the way Ede had displayed his art and possessions, balancing the preciousness of a stone to the preciousness of a Brancusi to a piece of textile fabric. It was quite a Zen-like experience – but in Britain.

I have been working for Loewe for the past four years, and within the first three weeks of being there I knew I wanted to start a craft prize. I felt that there wasn’t an international prize which tackled how we will present craft to the next generation, and that engages different demographics. It’s quite a personal project for me. I feel an obligation to help craft practitioners: to redefine craft and prevent it from being seen as a lower form than art. I want the prize to make it possible for practitioners to be able to continue making things that will outlive them and last for generations, without the constant commercial pressure to sell what they have made.

I hate it when people use sustainability as a marketing tool – I see it as an obligation. I try to work it into objects so that they become timeless, or that they will be rediscovered in a second-hand shop and someone will buy them again.

I’m an auction addict and I love bidding because you can buy a 300-year-old plate made in Britain for less than £100, and it will give satisfaction because it has history. It could be seen as incredibly boring and pretentious, but I find it so humbling to be able to eat off something that is being reused. I can’t help being nostalgic about the past, but that doesn’t mean I’d like to go and rebuild an arts and crafts home. I think it’s about how an idea is re-contextualised, and moved forwards.

Context is everything. I’m quite obsessed by the black plastic school chair – it’s just so fascinating and solid. Or just think of the pint glass. Every house has one: you can stick daffodils in it and it looks great; you can drink from it; it has a pint measure; it’s a functional object that we can all engage with. We shouldn’t be driven by what something’s worth. Everything has a story of value.

We are so dependent on digital media that we need to counteract that with something more human. No matter what your educational, social, financial background, we naturally want to touch things. We see so much online two-dimensional imagery, and craft is a three-dimensional antidote to that.

The Loewe Craft Prize exhibition is at the Design Museum, London, 4 May to 17 June. The winner is announced on 3 May (designmuseum.org). Loewe explores textile techniques from around the world at the Salone del Mobile, Milan, 17-22 April). Its collection of blankets, tapestries and bags will be on sale in stores later this year (loewe.com)

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